‘She sounded like the cosmos breathing’: artists on Alice Coltrane

It is 19 years since Alice Coltrane’s death and more than half a century since her best-known albums, yet only now is her first biography, Andy Beta’s Cosmic Music, being published. The first major exhibition devoted to her took place last year in LA, and musicians from mainstream to left field have been championing her work.

“For so long it seemed like her contributions were overlooked,” says her grandnephew Steven Ellison, AKA Flying Lotus. “As I was growing up, it seemed like everyone just wanted to ask her about John Coltrane.” She was integral to the radicalism of John Coltrane’s late period and already a formidable musician before they met.

As pianist Alice McLeod she was “known as a badass on the scene”, Carlos Niño notes, her skills honed in Detroit’s gospel churches and by her mid-teens in Stravinsky and Rachmaninov. After John’s death her solo work widened its scope, weaving global instrumentation and Hindu meditational practice with lavish orchestral arrangements and the harp to build an immersive sound world.

alice coltrane, cosmic music, andy beta, flying lotus, john coltrane, alice mcleod, detroit, los angeles, stravinsky, rachmaninov